Abstract
This article asks how pious religious practices, which are often highly gendered, and implicated in diverse formulations of “the modern” in non-Western contexts. Based on ethnographic research among women members of Indonesia's Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), I argue that PKS women’s pious practices are part of the creation of a particular kind of middle class subjectivity. An examination of two constitutive elements of this habitus, clothing and marriage, reveals how these pious Islamic practices enact class and gender difference, and simultaneously produce “modern” selves. While scholars have shown that gender is an important axis for class difference, I extend this argument to suggest that gendered forms of piety are key ways class in which distinctions are embodied and expressed. Yet the habitus of PKS women is just one of several competing Islamic habitus in Indonesia. The question of which habitus is most culturally legitimate, I maintain, turns on the hegemony of particular understandings of piety and ideas about how modernity should be defined–issues which remain unresolved in contemporary Indonesia.
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Notes
Indonesian translation of an Arabic phrase meaning to do what is right and reject what is wrong.
An important difference between women in PKS and other middle class Indonesian women is that PKS women on average have more children. This finding accords with Turner and Tong’s (this volume) study of pious Malaysian women. PKS women have a similar focus on investing in the upbringing of their children. They are not philosophically opposed to family planning, but value large families. Elsewhere, I connect their higher birth rates to the party’s broader pro-natalist politics, which emphasize the building of the Islamic ummat (Rinaldo 2007).
It is important to note that many of the members of Muslim women’s rights groups grew up within the milieu of the Nadhlatul Ulama, Indonesia’s largest Muslim organization, and attended Muslim primary and secondary schools as well as Muslim state universities. I do not have enough data on the PKS leadership to know if most graduated from secular or religious universities. However, the PKS women I interviewed were nearly all graduates of secular universities. This finding accords with research on pious Muslim movements in other parts of the world (Roy 2004).
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Postdoctoral Fellow 2007–2008, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.